D’Souza doesn’t hit the viewer over the head with this argument in the movie. Instead he eases into it by musing on the quite extraordinary parallels between his life and Obama’s — two men of mixed race and comparable skin color who were born in the same year, entered Ivy League colleges in the same year, graduated in the same year and went on to enjoy improbable successes (D’Souza is a college president as well as a best-selling author of multiple volumes, a notable culture warrior, and now an auteur), given their differently modest beginnings. But then the two diverge. At Dartmouth, D’Souza becomes an enthusiastic proponent and admirer of American-style entrepreneurial capitalism and a believer in American exceptionalism. Unlike the once glorious but fallen empires he recalls reading about as a child in India, America, he declares, is an “empire of ideals” — individual rights, freedom of choice, upward mobility limited only by your willingness to work hard; and the fact that the nation has not always lived up to its ideals is a testament to the power they exert even as they are being breached. In contrast, Obama, first at Columbia and later at Harvard, is influenced by leftist teachers like Edward Said and Roberto Unger, immerses himself in texts by Marxist, feminist and ant-colonialist authors, and thus fleshes out the lineaments of “his father’s third world collectivism.” And so the immigrant and the native-born American, alike in so many ways, end up holding ideologically opposed positions that lead them to have different views on any number of issues — debt, oil drilling, health care, the Middle East, Egypt, Libya, nuclear disarmament, global warning, financial regulation, Supreme Court appointments, you name it. In each instance Obama’s view is explained by D’Souza as a logical extension of an anti-colonialist desire to take funds, goods and weapons away from the haves — the United States and its allies — and give them to the have-nots, to poor countries in general and Muslim countries in particular. Rather than laboring to maintain and increase American dominance, Obama, says D’Souza, is busy leveling the playing field so that no nation will have control of the world’s resources and be in a position to call the tune.